Yahoo! Product Search is a new beta search tool designed to help consumers find a comprehensive listing of products available on the Web. Product Search enables consumers to search through millions of items from thousands of merchants, to find, compare, and buy almost anything.

Worse than google adwords, because Yahoo gives the option to sort prices 'low to high'.

If these things ever catch on, we'll have to 'thank them' for all the bandwidth they'll save us, because potential customers will no longer have to be inconvenienced with actually coming to our website.

jeff weiner of Yahoo Search did mention (at SES san jose) that they were very pleased with their new product comparison product and I guess this is what he was referring to. I think digitial cameras was the example.

From what I gathered, I think they are doing site/product with separate crawlers of some type to handle the structured data.

they have a long way to go with their technology. When you do a price sort for hardware, for example iPod 15gb, then 1st you get all the accessories, then you get the devices.

I think they need to lay down very clear lines to merchants on how to set-up the datafeed, and then get a majority of their content in data-feeds before launching the search. Otherwise customers will come to them and run away because of the irrelevant results.

Holy cow batman this YahooSeeker bot has just hit my site over 4000 times! Perhaps I have my robots.txt wrong, but is it correct to exclude a dynamic page, which will later be used with extra parameters like this:

disallow:page.asp

Should that stop a bot from getting page.asp?id=1 or have I got this bit wrong? :(

For me, I dont see the harm in the pages it has taken, it may actually be very beneficial. If Yahoo's new search (I assume they're building an engine around this?) is anything like google's technology it may make a nice test-bed for me to un-exclude these pages anyway :) But are they violating robots.txt?

Had to ban YahooSeeker in .htaccess I didn't have rules set up in robots.txt but this thing was *hammering* my site. Some dynamic pages on my site take a while to load so instead of waiting/giving up this thing just keeps going for it! Needless to say my little site couldn't handle it. Checked yahoo's product search and couldn't see myself in there so why suffer the hammering if I'm getting nothing out of it? If anyone starts to see profits from YahooSeeker spidering effects please let me know though.